The Great Adult Content Crackdown Has Begun

[Drukpa Kunley]

Only Hours After FOSTA-SESTA Passes, Reddit Bans 'Escorts' and 'SugarDaddy' Communities

The Great Adult Website Content Crackdown Has Begun


Sometime around 2 a.m. Reddit banned several long-running sex worker forums from the platform. The move came just hours after the Senate passed a bill making digital facilitation of prostitution a federal crime. Under the new law, social media sites and other hubs of user-generated content can be held criminally liable.

For months, sex workers have warned that the passage of "SESTA" or "FOSTA" would mark the end of all online forums for communication with clients, lawyers, or each other. Reddit's takedown of these subreddits confirmed their fears about the new legislation.

Even if individuals aren't targeted by law enforcement for placing ads, and even if individual cases brought by state prosecutors are struck down as unconstitutional, a lot of platforms will preemptively ban anything remotely related to sex work rather than risk it.

FOSTA-SESTA seriously chips away at Section 230, the federal provision that protects web publishers from being treated as the speaker of user-generated content.

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—who coauthored the Section 230 language in the '90s—noted, once you carve out a loophole for one bad thing (in this case, the change is allegedly meant to stop sex-trafficking), it's easy for legislators and courts to carve out loopholes and justifications for everything.

But as Wyden also points out, this strategy doesn't mean that more sex-traffickers will be caught and punished. It just means treating adult content websites like criminals, which would make the government a lot of money, does nothing for safety or justice.

Wyden told his colleagues from the Senate floor. "Despite the fact that Section 230 undergirds the framework of the internet as we know it today, there's a signifficant effort to take it down and collapse it."

The result will be "an enourmous chilling effect on speech in America," Wyden warned.

Looks like we're already seeing the effects.


FOSTA-SESTA is a demolition of Section 230.


https://reason.com/blog/2018/03/22/r...ort-subreddits